Food products which require a minimum amount of consumer preparation and are quick to prepare are common items on grocery store shelves and in refrigerator or freezer cases. Examples range from cheese and cracker snacks and canned stews to refrigerated bagels and some frozen dinners. Typically, such products will be eaten as packaged or after a brief heating period, preferably by microwave heating. Notably absent from this category are pizza products having a fully baked or a partially baked pizza crust.
Pizza products, while widely available frozen, are generally not as widely available as a refrigerated product. Refrigerated pizza products tend to be manufactured and distributed in a relatively small locale. In either case, the available pizza products, frozen or refrigerated, need to be fully baked before they can be eaten. One reason that refrigerated or frozen pizzas having baked or partially baked crusts are not available lies in the fact that once a fully baked pizza crust, which is a bread, has been refrigerated or frozen, it tends to "toughen" or become leathery, stale and/or dry as does bread crust. E. David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery, American Edition (Viking Press, New York 1977) page 225. The term "leathery" as used by David and herein is a term of art. When a crust becomes leathery, it becomes harder to chew, thereby losing "chewability". Furthermore, the distinction between the crisper bottom of the crust and the softer top part of the crust is lost when a baked crust is refrigerated, regardless of whether the crust is later eaten cold or reheated.
Reheating pizza, a common mode for consuming leftover pizza will not make the crust return to its original state and may serve both to further "toughen" it and decrease the distinction between the crisper and softer parts of the crust. Most people have had an experience with leathery or tough pizza crust when they have eaten cold or reheated leftover pizzeria pizza. While such leftover pizza may be fully edible from all health and safety considerations, the eating enjoyment obtained from such leftovers are generally less than those experienced when the pizza was eaten fresh due to the crust becoming leathery.
For these reasons, fully baked pizzas or pizzas having a fully baked crust are not often found in grocery refrigerator or freezer cases.
Refrigerated pizzas with unbaked crust will also encounter additional problems which are avoided in a frozen product. These are (1) the sauce soaking into the crust (moisture migration), (2) the sauce and other toppings becoming maldistributed on or knocked off the crust during transport, and (3) flavor, odor and microbiological migration, e.g. from sauce or meat to cheese. While these problems may be avoided to some extent by turning the refrigerated, unbaked crust product into a kit from which a pizza can be assembled, this procedure will not result in a ready-to-eat pizza as described by the present invention because the crust of such pizza, in fact the entire pizza, will still have to be baked in a normal manner as for a frozen pizza or in a pizzeria.
Thus, there exists a need for a pizza crust which can be baked, refrigerated and subsequently eaten cold, warm or hot (i.e., reheated) without further baking and without the crust becoming leathery or there occurring any significant degradation of crust properties relative to the same properties of the crust when freshly baked; and said crust being equally tasty and chewable either hot or cold.
There further exists a need for a ready-to-eat pizza and kit containing a baked crust, which kit and crust can be refrigerated without the crust becoming leathery, dry and/or stale; said refrigerated crust being equally tasty and satisfactorily chewable either hot or cold. It is preferable that the ready-to-eat pizza be provided in kit form, said kit having the components necessary to assembly a ready-to-eat pizza.
Thus it is an object of the invention to provide a pizza crust which may be refrigerated without becoming leathery, tough, dry and/or stale when served either hot or cold.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a kit, preferably a kit which can be refrigerated, containing all the ingredients for assembling a ready-to-eat pizza, said kit comprising a pizza crust which can be refrigerated without becoming leathery when served either hot or cold, pizza sauce and selected toppings for said pizza crust to thereby make a pizza.